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Nurse accused in deaths of 8 elderly nursing home residents appears in court

Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer, of Woodstock, is shown in this still image taken from video provided by Citynews Toronto Tuesday Oct. 25, 2016. Police have charged the nurse with murder, alleging she killed eight nursing home residents by administering a drug. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Citynews Toronto)

It took no more than two minutes for accused nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s video court appearance, a formality so speedy that even she seemed surprised.

“That’s it?” the short, portly Woodstock woman said while looking up to the corrections officer at the Vanier Centre for Women marking down her next court date on a clipboard.

Not even close.

Everyone in the ornate Woodstock courtroom — the Crown, the defence and the phalanx of media there to see the woman charged with eight counts of first-degree murder — knew that the short scheduling procedure was like a pistol going off at the starting line of a marathon.

The same goes for Andrea Silcox, 54, the youngest daughter of James Silcox, 84, who died Aug. 17, 2007, eight days after moving into Woodstock’s Caressant Care nursing home. Andrea Silcox was the only family member in the courtroom of the eight elderly nursing home residents Wettlaufer is accusing of killing while working as a nurse in Woodstock and London.

Sitting in the back and carrying the battered Bible that her dad kept with him in Europe while he served with the Canadian military during the Second World War, Silcox readied herself for the long haul.

The Bible, its cover torn from the spine, had been her father’s companion through his most fearful moments and happy days. As an afterthought, he’d signed and dated it in 1963.

“I’m just keeping this with me just to honour my father and knowing that my father’s with me, giving me strength through this whole thing,” she said outside of court.

Wettlaufer was charged last week in a case as big as the Bandido murders a decade ago when eight motorcycle club members were found executed just outside of Shedden. Six men were convicted.

What’s different about the Woodstock case is that Wettlaufer is the lone accused in deaths that took place over a seven-year period. That has shaken a fundamental trust communities have with their health-care system, and specifically in this case, the care given to vulnerable seniors.

She was a nurse at Woodstock’s Caressant Care between 2007 and 2014 where police say seven of the eight people died. The other death was at London’s Meadow Park nursing home where Wettlaufer worked briefly in 2014.

The diminutive Wettlaufer, known to have both mental health and addiction issues, appeared in court on a TV screen from a feed from the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton.

Dressed in a baggy dark green sweatshirt, and barely reaching the shoulder height of the corrections officer with her, she peered intently out into the courtroom, while her defence lawyer Brad Burgess set her next video court appearance for Nov. 18.

Burgess told Justice of the Peace Sonia Aleong that he had met with the Crown, had received some of the Crown’s disclosure and expected more would be “coming down the pipe.”

Silcox, one of five kids, hopes there’s more answers in the Crown’s case as she and her family relive the anguish of losing an elderly family member nine years after his death.

Her dad’s death is the first in time on Wettlaufer’s indictment. Silcox said she found out about his shocking connection to Wettlaufer from co-workers and in the newspaper. Her brother heard the news on the radio in a Peterborough shopping mall.

Her initial anger has somewhat subsided since she spoke to Postmedia reporter Megan Stacey shortly after the news broke on Wettlaufer’s arrest, she told a media scrum outside the courthouse.

“What’s happened has happened and I can’t bring my dad back,” Silcox said. “But there’s no sense being angry. It’s not going to get me anywhere but ulcers.”

“I was angry, very angry. But it’s more than just her. It’s more than just what I see in the video.”

Silcox said she had her suspicions that something “just didn’t seem right” after her father’s death.

Despite a broken hip, a two-insulin-needle-a-day diabetes and some dementia, her father was “a good strong man.”

But in the days before his death, her father wasn’t well. When she last saw him, he was having flashbacks to the war and his job as a machine shop foreperson at Standard Tube.

Silcox also knew from her work as a housekeeper at another Oxford County long-term care home that new residents often have trouble adjusting to their new surroundings and will lash out “and it’s sometimes not pretty.”

Shockingly, even though family members asked for an autopsy, the coroner’s office in Oxford County talked them out of their request. “The coroner said, ‘He lived in long-term care, he was 85 years old, why bother?’ ” she said.

That’s left Silcox and her family with a lingering regret that perhaps a post mortem might have yielded some useful evidence for the case.

If her father died of an insulin overdose, she’s been assured by medical professionals that all of the drug would have likely been out of his system and possibly not detected, Silcox said.

But what gnaws at her is that her dad, a man who had come through the war, some dementia and diabetes, possibly didn’t die on his own terms.

Her father was a war hero, and she wants to make him proud. “I want to be my father’s hero if I possibly can and support him as long as I possibly can, as long as this whole drama takes to get through,” Silcox said.

There’s much more to come. She wants to meet the other grieving families and get ready for the “very slow, very long process” that will sadly bring them together through the justice system.

“It’s all got to start some place and today was supposed to be it,” she said about Wettlaufer’s first brief video appearance.

“There’s a lot more to every investigation, not just we see on the surface. . . . Things are going to go a lot deeper than what we see in there.”